Re: Where do I begin?

From: John Smart <JSmart_at_InternetDesign.com>
Date: Fri 23 Aug 2002 22:35:29 -0500

"Steve Werby" <steve-lists_at_befriend.com> wrote:

>Not so. In fact, I have built several sites where dynamic content is
>regularly converted into static pages. Why? Because the page content for
>the dynamically generated pages either doesn't change or changes
>infrequently and I could reduce the load on the server while serving up
>pages much more quickly. Of course, the benefits will be more pronounced
>on a high traffic site and/or a site with complex dynamic pages that use a
>lot of CPU cycles and take longer than desired to load. On some sites I
>just run a regularly scheduled script periodically to loop through all
>pertinent database records and rebuild all pages. On other sites, I loop
>through the database records, checking for flags or timestamps and only
>update pages that have changed since the previous run of the script. For
>example, I had a client who ran an affiliate hotel directory site. The
>site had tens of thousands of dynamic pages that were generated by a Perl
>script that pulled data from a database, formatted it and displayed it.
>With 200,000 page views per day on a low end server, the load was
>significant during peak times. But the content on each page only changed
>when a new dataset was loaded once per month. So I wrote a script to loop
>through the database after the dataset was loaded and generate a static
>HTML page for each hotel. Instead of running the script 6 million times per
>month as the user loaded the page, my script was run once per month. As a
>result the time required for the webserver to generate a page during peak
>load went from about 6 seconds to 0.2 seconds.

I had not thought the process through to that level. I must thank you for
the above - there is an area on our site which does strain the server
without need. I shall make the changes, and my server and I are grateful to
you.

>> It is possible to "hide" dynamic content - all of my site
>> (www.internetdesign.com) is dynamic, but 90%+ of the pages end .html - I
>> just told Apache to treat .html as .php.

>Dynamic content per se is not the issue. The issue is that URLs with query
>strings will be ignored by some SE spiders and will result in lower SE
>positioning in some SEs. IMO, simply changing extensions from .php, .jsp,
>.pl, .cgi, .asp or something else associated with a scripting language to
>.htm or .html will accomplish little. It's whether the URL contains a
>query string and .htm and .html files can contain them too.

What I was leading too - and failed badly at doing (I really must read my
messages before I send them) is a way around the issue - not just hiding the
file extension, but hiding the query string also.

For example, suppose you had a cookery site, and had a link to all recipes
that used milk and sugar. A static link to a dynamic url may read:

/recipies.asp?ingredients=milk+sugar

This is what we are trying to avoid (as I understand it), and I have avoided
this a lot on my site by using pass-through pages (not a technical term -
just a label I have applied, I am sure that there is a technical term for
such a process).

Set the link to point to a new page:
sugarandmilk.php

The page contents would be:
<?
include "http://domain.comrecipies.asp?ingredients=milk+sugar";
?>

This gives the desired end result - namely a page containing the dynamically
created content with the recipes in it, whilst the url has no question marks
or other content to upset the search engines.

With a site that contained frequently changing information, and the
information changed the top level of links, this method would probably be
too much work to be viable. But for a lot of situations this can work very
well.

Alas, I know not how to achieve this with ASP, although I am sure it can be
easily done. I am also aware that the same result can be made with SSI.

>> Feel
>> free to mail me for details of this - I don't want to bore the entire
>> subscriber base with my nerdy ramblings!

>Isn't the point of this mailing list to share ideas and knowledge?

You are quite correct in that - you will have to excuse my error. I am
involved with many lists, and when something gets too nerdy, it seems common
to take it away from the group so as not to weigh it down with what could
well be irrelevant to the majority. I had no intention of keeping my
information secret, I just didn't expect anyone would want it! That was an
error, for which I do apologize.


John Smart
InternetDesign.com
A Human Touch in a Digital World





Received on Fri Aug 23 2002 - 22:35:29 CDT